The federal government wastes taxpayers’ hard-earned money in thousands of ways, large and small. The latest annual “Wastebook” compiled by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., provides a small window into the government’s workings — and lack thereof — offering 50 examples of such waste, totaling more than $5 billion.

The largest-ticket item is the $3.1 billion the Federal Railroad Administration has made available for the doomed California high-speed rail project. “Already billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, the only ones being taken for a ride by the train are taxpayers,” the report quips.

This is hardly the only boondoggle on the list, however. The Energy Department has wasted $450 million on a clean-energy project intended to capture carbon dioxide emitted during the production of energy from coal. The project is six years behind schedule and has failed to even break ground.

The Internal Revenue Service spent $12 million on an email archiving system that it never used. The software needed to activate it was never even deployed, an inspector general’s review noted, but this did not stop the IRS from paying subscription and renewal fees.

And what would a government be without wasteful subsidies? Like the $825,000 doled out to makers of tea, whiskey and other hard liquors. And don’t forget government cheese. “There is more surplus cheese stored in refrigerated warehouses in the U.S. than at any time since the records were first taken 100 years ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” the Wastebook reports. But that did not stop the government from spending $20 million to buy up about 11 million pounds of “surplus” cheese, at the behest of industry groups and “requests from Congress.” And that does not even include an additional $1.8 million in subsidies for 16 new cheese-making ventures.

Sometimes, of course, the government is just inept. A Labor Department job-training program for laid-off casino workers in Atlantic City, N.J., has proven no more effective than most of the dozens of other federal job-training programs, with only 18 percent of the nearly 7,000 former employees participating in the program, and a mere 29 percent of those able to find jobs. Fortunately, less than $3 million of the $29.4 million grant had been tapped as of May.

In the “Thanks, Captain Obvious” category of government research grants, the National Institutes for Health provided $5 million in grants for a study on the behavior of college fraternity and sorority members, which reached such insightful conclusions as: “Greek members engaged in more risky health behaviors (e.g., alcohol use, cigarette smoking, sexual partners and sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs) than non-Greek members.”

In addition, the NIH and the National Science Foundation gave $300,000 for a study that found that women were better at picking out the face of Barbie dolls from a collection of images, and men were better at correctly identifying cars and the faces of Transformers, supporting the researchers’ supposition “that men may have played more with Transformers then [sic] Barbies when they were younger, and vice versa for women.”

Then there was the $560,000 the NSF gave UCSD’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography to use a treadmill to test the endurance of mudskippers, fish that can live out of the water for extended periods and use their fins like legs to walk on land. This is just the latest in a long line of taxpayer-funded studies of animals on treadmills, which in recent years includes shrimp on a treadmill, mountain lions on a treadmill and monkeys in hamster balls on a treadmill — each to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is saddening, and more than a bit frustrating, how much waste, inefficiency and even outright corruption people are willing to tolerate in their government. Yet, many persist in their undying faith in government to flawlessly direct the personal and financial lives of hundreds of millions of people.

To restore our freedoms — and pocketbooks — and truly “drain the swamp,” as President Donald Trump has promised, we must recognize, as Ronald Reagan observed, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Only then can we strike at the root and eliminate not just a few boondoggles, subsidies and silly research studies, but rather start to peel back entire layers of government.

Adam B. Summers is a columnist with the Southern California News Group.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.